Latest additions to the video library
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Meek”
Meek
Poem by Harry Martinson
Film by Ana Perez Lopez
Voice by Johnny Carlson
Oloström is a municipality in Sweden where Ana Perez Lopez did an artist-in-residency. Much like any town or area it boasts of generations that chose to stay, thus preserving its culture—unfortunately not without sacrifice. This is the focus of the video poem Meek.
Oloström could be anywhere. I would compare it to Pittsburgh, but I assume it’s much more visually appealing. This is my guess. I would like to think that Lopez is trying to convince us that there is an aspect which is intriguing, even though it has succumbed to the modern age. All in all I think her interpretation of the poem is dead on. It sheds a light on how modernization has made life in Oloström mundane. “But Oloström grew with a factory, a building where everything from pots, bullets and cars can be made.” (A quote from her Vimeo description.)
Ana chose to animate Meek using a cut paper/wood block style. It’s monochromatic, blue and white, scratchy, and the entire look lends itself to simple computer and/or traditional animation. I suppose the sheet music floating in the background is the same we hear in the video poem. It’s a nice design element, but since I don’t read music, for me it remains a mystery. I’ll take her word for it because it is graphically uncomplicated, which reinforces the message, thereby making Meek a very powerful work of art.
Visit Ana Perez Lopez at Vimeo.
Sun/Moon Diglossia (Dancepoem) by Eleni Cay
Eleni Cay is poet, filmmaker and dancer here. Her dance partner, Chris Bradley, is the choreographer. Music is by David Garrett, and Sarah Jane Mukherjee and Christian Payne provided the voiceovers. To read the text of the poem, click through to YouTube.
Cay is a researcher originally from Slovakia, and is currently poet-in-residence at Westbury Arts Centre in Milton Keynes, UK. She has an essay up at Poetryfilmkanal, “Poetryfilms: when poetry and film have a flirt.”
A Day at the Mall Reminds Me of America by Sarah Blake
Motionpoems has just kicked off its 6th season with this tour de force from the Turkish-American filmmaker Ayse Altinok. The cinematography is by Greg Schmidt and the music by William Orbit.
Sarah Blake‘s poem appears in her debut collection Mr. West, an “unauthorized lyric biography of Kanye West” which Evie Shockley calls “tender without being sentimental, funny without being cruel, and obsessive without being exploitative.” Check out Arisa White‘s interviews with Blake and Altinok at the Motionpoems website. Blake says, in part:
I love the film. I felt like [Ayşe] made me a version of Kanye West’s music video for his song, ‘Flashing Lights’—a version of it just for me and my poem.
And Altinok notes that she deliberately chose a shorter poem with lots of room for cinematic exploration:
“Less words, more story” is very interesting to me in any discipline. I didn’t want to explain the poem, I wanted to duet the words and the meanings explored in the text. When I read the poem, I immediately saw the 14-year-old girl and her world. It wasn’t a struggle to bring her to life. It was a very relevant subject to me. I love youth culture and also visual poetry; this was a heavenly project. […]
After I read the poem I immediately started writing a script. It was more of a shot-list at first. I didn’t bother writing the happenings in a poetic way, I thought the poetry was already written by Sarah Blake, so I only put ideas on paper in a very practical manner. It was literally a list of scenes. I definitely knew my character needed to be the 14-year-old, rather than the woman who is the pregnant narrator. She didn’t seem too interesting to me, like myself—I can never make a film about me, but I want to make films about things I like. Rather, things I find fruitful (story-wise). I also thought my writing sucked, so at that point, I turned to photography. I started looking at pictures, mostly portraits, and created this character, and give her an identity. I felt very free—that was the best part of working with a poem.
In terms of script, though, I had to structure it in a way that felt compelling, and with a sense of beginning, middle, and end. It was a fragile story, I didn’t want to make a big statement, but I didn’t want to create just fluff, with a bunch of beautiful images and no thread, either—it was a gentle balance, not too much story that kills the poem, but not too freestyle that loses its meaning. I wanted people to feel what it’s like to live this character’s life, rather then me telling them how to.
Bees by Beverley Nadin
Kate Sweeney directed this film for Beverley Nadin’s Commended poem in the 2014 National Poetry Competition.
From the judges: ”This poem of historical abuse works powerfully because it’s written with a tremulous watchful grace. The adult perspective recalling the child perspective is very finely done, as the bifurcated character remembers the day that clove her in two. Its rhymes are halting, haunting, they come and go as if desperate both to remember and forget.” – Glyn Maxwell.
The Poetry Society’s annual National Poetry Competition is for previously unpublished single poems.
Filmpoems have been commissioned in partnership with Alastair Cook and Filmpoem for all eleven winning poems, and will tour at festivals around the country and beyond.
Considering Luminescence / Consideraciones Sobre la Luz by Laura M Kaminski
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Spanish filmmaker Eduardo Yagüe has once again taken the difficult route and produced two entirely different films for the English and Spanish versions of a text. The author is U.S. poet Laura M Kaminski. For Considering Luminescence, Yagüe used the voice recording by Maureen Alsop at The Poetry Storehouse and music by Fourhands Project, and worked with the actress Gabrielle Roy. Consideraciones Sobre la Luz features Yagüe’s own translation and voice, music by Martin Rach, and the actor Faustino Fernández. Both films were shot this May, the first in Madrid and the second in Gijón.
